170 Responses

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” — Steve Jobs

My first experience with computers was the two shiny new Apple ][s at school. But when I needed my own computer doing postgrad, budget forced me to the dark side, so that by the time I was doing a bit of copyediting in a graphics agency, they were "alien" machines. The guys there managed to crash them quite regularly (followed by 10 minute reboot - possibly they were just pushing them too hard.I bought an ageing powerPC Mac from a designer in order to do "mac testing" of websites, but it had been OS-upgraded beyond its capability and was too slow to do anything useful with.I remember at Webstock '06 at least half the presenters spent 5 or more minutes riffing on the failings of the Ipod.So obviously I'm not a fanboy (although I dislike Apple less than I dislike Microsoft) - but I believe Steve's legacy was a great one. He set the ball rolling, then made many innovations which others emulated cheaper, faster, more feature-rich. Does that make Apple the hardware equivalent of Opera Software?He also understood marketing (in the fullest sense of the word) better than any of the competition. The upside of that is that it de-geeked technology and put it in the hands of people who would have shied away from it otherwise - the downside that they managed to put style over substance in many of their products.R.I.P Steve Jobs

He also understood marketing (in the fullest sense of the word) better than any of the competition. The upside of that is that it de-geeked technology and put it in the hands of people who would have shied away from it otherwise – the downside that they managed to put style over substance in many of their products.

And yet, these are the products that creative people are associating with the real, productive work they’ve done over decades. So I don’t accept that characterisation – with a few notable exceptions like the Cube. (Yes, I’m ignoring the dark years.)

And it bears noting that at Webstock ’11, about two thirds of the room was using Apple products.

Undeniably they are, Russell, but is that purely because of the hardware and OS, or is much of the credit due to software pioneers such as Adobe who were slow to port their excellent products to PC, and thence to industry pressure*. The smile often vanished from print industry sales reps' faces when I told them copy would be from Corel, or on a PC-format zip disk.* For graphics - I think Mac really was a better platform for creating audio, which is never a field I got into.

During the late 80s, formy first two years at varsity I had a cleaning job. One of the offices I cleaned as 7 College Hill - the home, at the time, of Apple NZ. They had a lot of promotional material around the place, being naturally curious, I read everything I could get my hands on.

I was impressed at the direction they were taking personal computing. Desktop publishing, little bags that you could put your Mac in so you could move it, that kind of thing. I also read about this new technology (which, IIRC, required a hardware upgrade) called HyperCard. It allowed you to navigate to related topics by clicking on things called "Hyperlink". Now that, I thought at the time, had promise...

The 90s were indeed dark days for Apple, and it felt as if the company could fall over at any time.

My favourite thought about Steve Jobs is something a friend said about him once:

"He created a billion dollar company. And then he did it all over again."

The smile often vanished from print industry sales reps’ faces when I told them copy would be from Corel, or on a PC-format zip disk.

Thanks to the infamous Click of Death, the Zip Drive Parallel Port edition was the worst $345 (in 1997 dollars) I ever spent in my computing life. And unfortunately, the class-action lawsuit only applied in North America.

Jobs was nearly alone in the computer industry in his belief that it was better for users if a single company made every part of every device. In an age ruled by mediocre modularity—where one company makes your hardware, another makes your software, and another bundles ads and crapware onto the machine—Jobs saw electronics as an expression of a fierce, if inscrutable, artistic vision

writes Farhad Manjoo at Slate.Of course Fisher & Paykel used to do this as well

As someone who was frogmarched to a PC a couple of months back (my faculty arguing that they couldn't support Macs), I am with Russell in only tolerating my Dell. I sometimes wonder how a one-armed person would turn it on (control/alt/delete).

As someone who was frogmarched to a PC a couple of months back (my faculty arguing that they couldn’t support Macs), I am with Russell in only tolerating my Dell. I sometimes wonder how a one-armed person would turn it on (control/alt/delete).

Yeah, it's a crap default.

BUT, it's not as if Dell has an operating system. IMO, Windows 7 was the version that finally caught up with Apple. Took a while, to say the least. ;)